Chippy The StarFishBy:Paul acello

I was 7 years old and had a normal 7 year old's life, was in school, had a social life, chores,sports, and a Starfish (Average). It was a fun time especially the not having an hours worth of homework to do every night. But even though I was 7 I still had the responsibility to take care of my pet a starfish. Taking care of a starfish is cool because its really really easy and he was in a fish tank with lots of other fish that produced algae on the glass of the aquarium and he would eat it and that would be his food, and an easy and efficient way of cleaning the tank but sometimes i would feed him little shrimp. His name was chocolate chip, because he was brown and had chocolate chip looking spikes on his back but I called him chippy more often than not. Every time either my friends came over or when I got home I would make sure he was OK, to play with him, and feed him some little shrimps. You might be thinking how do you play with a starfish, it wasn't even playing it was putting him on your hand and let him crawl around until he starts to crawl onto your fingers and bites them because he was kind of a jerk. Eventually I did need to put him back in the Aquarium because if I didn't he would start to form a layer of mucus around himself and having my hands covered in mucus isn't exactly my favorite activity in the world. Around the end of june chippy got a disease or some kind of illness. So my Dad put him in a Quarantine tank to keep him safe from the other fish in his normal Tank.This really stunk because my mom said “Paul don’t take chippy out of his tank for 3 weeks until he’s better” but in my 7 year old ignorance I took him out of the tank and only one week away from when he was gonna get better. But because of this stupidity and ignorance I took him out and not even 30 seconds later he died and went limp. At first I didn't understand what was happening to him and I thought he was sleeping so for a straight 5 minutes I was confusedly poking him eventually I realized that he died so I in shock of finally realizing he was gone I just slowly put him in his tank and walking away watching his limp arms sag and his body sink to the bottom tearing up as I walked away. As soon as I left the room I ran as fast as I could to My Dad and told him that Chippy was dead he was shocked all he said was “WHAT?!” and then ran down stairs to check on him and he stood in awe and asked me “what had happened” I lied and said “I don't know” and I felt the guilt and pain of not only lying to my dad but also killing my pet starfish. As stupid as it sounds but Starfish are man's best friends. This is difficult topic to remember not only because it was 7 years ago but also its a dark sad memory that I don’t like to reminisce upon because I have to remember that because of a stupid ignorant mistake I killed my pet.